"Bringing together scholarly essays and helpfully annotated primary documents, African Americans and the Haitian Revolution collects not only the best recent scholarship on the subject, but also showcases the primary texts written by African Americans about the Haitian Revolution. Rather than being about the revolution itself, this collection attempts to show how the events in Haiti served to galvanize African Americans to think about themselves and to act in accordance with their beliefs, and contributes to the study of African Americans in the wider Atlantic World."--BOOK JACKET.

These letters of arrest (lettres de cachet) from France's Ancien Regime were often associated with excessive royal power and seen as a way for the king to imprison political opponents. In Disorderly Families, first published in French in 1982, Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault collect 94 letters from ordinary families who, with the help of hired scribes, submitted complaints to the king to intervene and resolve their family disputes. The letters evoke a fluid social space in which life in the home and on the street was regulated by the rhythms of relations between husbands and wives, or parents and children. Most impressively, these letters outline how ordinary people seized the mechanisms of power to address the king and make demands in the name of an emerging civil order.

"Helen Maria Williams (1761-1827), English poet, novelist, and chronicler of the French Revolution, here vividly recounts her experiences in France during the Terror. Arrested in the fall of 1793, Williams records with passion and sorrow the degeneration of the Revolution into chaos and murder. She sketches the colorful personalities of her friends and acquaintances (Madame Roland, Charlotte Corday, Georges-Jacques Danton) and enemies (Maximilien Robespierre, Louis-Antoine de St. Just, Jean-Paul Marat), while all the time displaying her enduring optimism that the Revolution would eventually succeed in liberty and justice for people everywhere."--BOOK JACKET.

This selection of original documents examines the constitutional and political problems of France in the decade 1785-1795 through the writings of contemporaries. A collection of documents translated into English with commentaries. The focus is on the constitutional and political problems in France.

By calming revolutionary turbulence while preserving fundamental gains of 1789, Napoleon Bonaparte laid the foundations of modern France. But his impact reached beyond France's borders as well. His legacy of war, civil rights, exploitation, and national awakening reshaped identities across the European continent, while in the Atlantic world he destroyed the colonial order and helped plant the seeds of American power.

"Based on a true story, Ourika relates the experiences of a Senegalese girl who is rescued from slavery and raised by an aristocratic French family during the French Revolution. Brought up in a household of learning and privilege, she is unaware of her difference until she overhears a conversation that makes her suddenly conscious of her race - and of the prejudice it arouses. From this point on, Ourika lives her life not as a French woman but as a black woman "cut off from the entire human race." As the Reign of Terror threatens her and her adoptive family, Ourika struggles with her unusual position as an educated African woman in eighteenth-century Europe." "A best-seller in the 1820s, Ourika captured the attention of Duras's peers, including Stendhal, and became the subject of four contemporary plays. The work represents a number of firsts: the first novel set in Europe to have a black heroine, the first French literary work narrated by a black female protagonist, and, as John Fowles points out in the foreword to his translation, "the first serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black mind." An inspiration for Fowles's acclaimed novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, Ourika will astonish and haunt modern readers."--BOOK JACKET

Mercier's Le Tableau de Paris, published from 1781 to 1788, is one of the forgotten treasures of French literature, offering a wealth of vivid portraits of Parisian life. Mercier was a pioneering urban ethnographer, a participant observer who described the society around him with the same sense of curiosity that drove the period's explorers to portray the natives of remote Pacific islands.

Maintaining that the trial and public execution of Louis XVI was an absolutely essential part of the French Revolution, Walzer discusses two types of regicide: the first, committed by would-be kings or their agents, left the monarchy's mystique and divine right intact, while the second was a revolutionary act intended to destroy it completely.

"The French Revolution was the culmination of the preceding three centuries and the inspiration or, alternatively, the whipping boy of the two centuries that followed. This is understandable enough, for it was the crucible wherein was forged the ideologies that continue to define political discourse - liberalism, conservatism, democracy, communism, anarchism, nationalism, and terrorism all enter the political arena with the Revolution. This anthology brings together the texts that cover the spectrum of French revolutionary social and political thought. The writings presented range from debates over the rights of man through proposals to equalize the distribution of property in society, to efforts to justify privilege and the corporate state."--BOOK JACKET.

In July 1789, Welsh-born George Cadogan Morgan, the nephew of the celebrated radical dissenter Richard Price, found himself in France at the outbreak of the French Revolution. In 1808, his family left Britain for America where his son, Richard Price Morgan, traveled extensively, made a descent of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers by raft, and helped build some of the early American railroads. The adventures of both men are related here via letters George sent home to his family from France and through the autobiography written by his son in America. Also available as an ebook.

Maclure Collection, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.
Van Pelt Library, 3420 Walnut St., Philadelphia.
The Maclure Collection contains some 20,000 pamphlets published in France between 1788 and 1802. The collection documents Revolutionary political and economic concerns in great depth. For a title-by-title listing of the collection, see the printed guide listed above.

The University of Warwick has an extensive collection of 18th and 19th century French plays. They have digitized 300 plays from the decade of the French Revolution and 150 more from the Napoleonic era. The texts are fully searchable by keyword and can be viewed both in facsimile and in type script.

Newspaper founded by Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, a prominent publisher in the Ancien Regime. The Monitor was intended to be a newspaper of record for the Revolution. It includes speeches from the Estates General and factual, accurate reporting rather than editorials.